By Julie A. Hochgesang, updated July 15, 2022
Introduction
Access
Importance of Archiving
Signed Language Archives in the US
How to cite this page
Resources
References
Introduction
Thoughts shared with #ISGS9 regarding the need and importance of language archiving for signed language videos as a part of a lunchtime presentation about Sign and Gesture Archive (SAGA)
To better contextualize this presentation, I’m a deaf linguist who has been doing signed language documentation for many years. My presentation is rooted in a US-based context, focused on signing in North America and acknowledgment of the different ways of identifying as deaf and language experiences associated with that.

Language archiving is the process of collecting, storing and sharing language texts (signed, spoken or written) for multipurpose use.
To consider the importance of language archiving for signed language videos, let’s start with Veditz who put it better than I ever could. (Also see Padden 2004)

As you can see from Veditz’s video, the best way to preserve language use is through moving picture (films). And here’s an example of those “moving picture (film)s”…
As we can see right away from the video above showing many ASL videos from different signers, contexts, regions, etc, the signed language use out there is incredibly rich and downright amazing.

So that amazingness is clear to us after just watching those videos ourselves but let’s say we wanted to search among them or even cite them, that’s where the trouble is. We as linguists or scholars who study language use often collect language data and keep them on our shelves as they gather dust.
There are thousands and thousands of videos scattered across the US. They’re in different formats, and processed differently even if at all. That all means they’re not accessible. I think this is unfortunate. It’s a problem referred to as “digital detritus” by Bird and Simons (2003) who acknowledge the widespread issue of content not being digital or, if digital, not accessible.
The (A)SL videos we are entrusted with are from the language communities and should be kept where the language communities themselves can access them. As we think about archiving, this should be done with permission and consideration of ethics led by deaf people. And, of course, these communities are not homogenous. The wide range of values and needs among the communities will require active reflection and engagement. Despite the potential of conflicting values or needs within the communities, I still think language archiving is important.
Here are some of the few reasons why archiving is worth it…

☝️ First off, ASL and other signed languages don’t have conventionalized writing systems, which are are time-honored ways of preserving information. As Veditz says, we need “moving picture (films)”.
Kira : What’s writing? Jen : Words that stay.
(Dark Crystal, 1982)

✌🏽 Processing (signed) language data (e.g., digital organization, creation of metadata, annotation, etc) is labor- and time-intensive. Why let all that work go to waste? It makes sense to archive processed data (permission-willing) for multipurpose use.

☝🏽☝🏿☝🏻 Our ASL data has often been centered on privileged groups – white, deaf of deaf, deaf-school-educated. We need a better representation of the actual range of the ASL communities. And again, we need do it with them or better yet with them leading. Language archives will serve us well here because there’s no one individual that can connect with all of the ASL communities out there but the representation is still needed.
Our communities clearly want a platform for our knowledge. Just see the handful of hashtags here indicating that need …
Language archiving allows us to take care of the data we’ve taken from the communities and to share back with the communities but we must be careful about how we do it and be mindful of lessons already shared by those who have been thinking about this for a while, such as “care, not control” by Taeyoon Choi, Indigenous groups who have been thinking about representation of their knowledge, and some library science scholars who have been grappling with the colonial harms of collecting and centralization.
Scholars of deaf studies, language documentation, anthropology and etc have been considering the process of language archiving or representation of information and how we go about it (Kusters et al 2017, Gawne et al 2017, Schembri 2019). I’ve considered the same kind of questions in my own review of signed language research in which I’ve noted that overall there is little transparency or explicit reflection of positionality or consideration of representation and accessibility of data (Hochgesang 2019 (thread), 2022).

It’s clear that we have a responsibility to the (A)SL communities to care for the data they have entrusted to us. We have these principles we can consider from others:
- Sign Language Communities Terms of Reference (SLCTR)
- Austin Principles of Data Citation
- FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability)
- CARE principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics)

Signed Language Archives in the US
While there are language archives out there (see resources), it has been hard to find suitable language archives in the US for signed language or gesture video data.
Our current need – and this has been echoed by many – is a stable digital repository to store, consistently organize, process (make machine-readable) and share our videos. And it’s something that needs to be sustainable or maintained over time. Basically we need an accessible digital curation system for stewardship of (A)SL videos.
Sign and Gesture Archive (SAGA) is a potential language archive for our signed language videos. It could store the ASL videos as shared with you in the beginning of the presentation video. SAGA is or will be home to these other ASL datasets:
- ASL acquisition data from 4 deaf children from deaf families from SLAAASh
(annotated in ELAN with ASL Signbank and SLAAASh conventions) - Tweety Bird narratives/data from classifier tasks (agent/number) from ASL, BSL, LIS, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Nicraguan homesigners, and HKSL
(partially annotated or segmented into ASL)
10 signers in each language - clips from the Valli Gallaudet Dictionary (2006)
(all lexical items, approx. 2500, with detailed phonological annotations) - a few ASL stories and poems of Peter Cook’s works
(open access; no annotations)

As I’ve said earlier, it’s clear we need to care for the signed language data that we’ve been given while reflecting upon the lessons by those who have been thinking about this for a long time. And we need to do all of this in a way that is aligned with the needs and values of the diverse (A)SL communities, which are not always easily reconciled and require constant reflection and engagement in order to care for our data.
How to cite this page:
Hochgesang, Julie (2022): (A)SL Archiving FOR-FOR?. figshare. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20319849.v1
Resources
Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections is an amazing online course introduction to language archiving.

The open-access Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management is now available and an incredible resource along with its companion site.

And I’m excited to announce that Signed Language Corpora (Gallaudet University Press) edited by Jordan Fenlon and myself with foreword by Trevor Johnston is out now!
“A brief history of archiving in language documentation, with an annotated bibliography” in Language Documentation and Conservation
How to be FAIR when you CARE: The DGS Corpus as a Case Study of Open Science Resources for Minority Languages from LREC 2022
Report on On-going Research: New Trends in ASL Variation Documentation
Some online ASL datasets
NOTE: These are all projects I’ve been involved in. If you know of a project that should be added here, let me know!
MoLo ASL (coming soon!)

Dudis, P. G., Hochgesang, J. A., Shaw, E., & Villanueva, M. (2020, November). Introduction to “Motivated Look at Indicating Verbs in ASL (MoLo)” Project. HDLS14, Virtual Conference. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/H8GK4
Philadelphia Sign Project

Fisher, J. N., Tamminga, M., & Hochgesang, J. A. (2020, March). Philly Signs. Philadelphia Sign Project. https://pennds.org/phillysigns/
O5S5: Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19
Hochgesang, J., Bates, M., Clark, A., Davis, K., Dunham, M., Hamilton, L., Kadar, S., Kim, Y., Martínez Castiblanco, J. A., Maucere, G., Newman, T., & Simmons, H.. (2021). O5S5: Documenting the experiences of the ASL Communities in the time of COVID-19 (Version2). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16983517.v2
Sign and Gesture Archive (SAGA)

Goldin-Meadows, S., Brentari, D., & Lillo-Martin, D. (2019). Sign and Gesture Archive (SAGA). https://saga.rcc.uchicago.edu/index.html
Some language archives
OLAC: Open Language Archives Community
Endangered Language Archive at SOAS University of London
CAVA Repository (BSL corpus here)
TROLLing: The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics
References
Berez-Kroeker, A. L., Andreassen, H. N., Gawne, L., Holton, G., Smythe Kung, S., Pulsifer, P., Collister, L. B., & The Data Citation and Attribution in Linguistics Group, & the Linguistics Data Interest Group. 2018. (2018). The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics. Version 1.0. Linguistics Data Citation. https://site.uit.no/linguisticsdatacitation/austinprinciples/
Bird, S., & Simons, G. (2003). Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description. Language, 79(3), 557–582. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2003.0149
Choi, T. (n.d.). Distributed Web of Care. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from http://distributedweb.care/
Gawne, L., Kelly, B. F., Berez-Kroeker, A. L., & Heston, T. (2017). Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions. Language Documentation & Conservation, 11, 157–189. https://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24731
Harris, R., Holmes, H. M., & Mertens, D. M. (2009). Research Ethics in Sign Language Communities. Sign Language Studies, 9(2), 104–131. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.0.0011
Hochgesang, J. A. (2019a, December 6). Sign Language Description: A Deaf Retrospective and Application of Best Practices from Language Documentation [Opening keynote presentation]. The 8th Meeting of Signed and Spoken Language Linguistics, National Museum of Ethnology, Minpaku, Osaka, Japan. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13393427.v1 Twitter Thread
Hochgesang, J. A. (2022, January 6). Documenting signed language use while considering our spaces as a Deaf* linguist. The 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Virtual/Washington DC. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17911973.v1 Filmed presentation
Hochgesang, J. A., & Shaw, E. (2019). Maintaining the Stories of the Deaf Communities at Gallaudet. Online Proceedings. Maintainers III: Practice, Policy and Care, Gallaudet University, Washington DC. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9941780.v2
Kusters, A., De Meulder, M., & O’Brien, D. (2017). Innovations in Deaf Studies: The Role of Deaf Scholars. Oxford University Press.
Leonard, W. Y. (2018). Reflections on (de)colonialism in language documentation. In B. McDonnell, A. L. Berez-Kroeker, & G. Holton (Eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15 (pp. 55–65). University of Hawai’i. http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/24808
Padden, C. (2004). Translating Veditz. Sign Language Studies, 4(3), 244–260.
Reidsma, M. (2019). Masked by Trust: Bias in Library Discovery. Litwin Books.
Schembri, A. (2019). Making visual languages visible: Data and methods transparency in sign language linguistics. 13th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR13), University of Hamburg.
Wilkinson, M. D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. J. J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., Blomberg, N., Boiten, J.-W., da Silva Santos, L. B., Bourne, P. E., Bouwman, J., Brookes, A. J., Clark, T., Crosas, M., Dillo, I., Dumon, O., Edmunds, S., Evelo, C. T., Finkers, R., … Mons, B. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3, 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18